Segmentation

Which of the following questions have not yet been discussed by any sales director and his collegues from marketing:

“Do our customers all think alike, or do they have considerably different preferences?”

“Is it more favourable to diversify our product in order to attract different groups of customers successfully?”

“Can we possibly reduce the immense fiscal losing of mass advertising?”

“Shouldn't we better target customers more tightly focussed in the first place?“

“Is there maybe a link between our various sociodemograhic and organisational demographic data from our customer data base and customer preferences? Could we deduce from these data a reasonable customer segmentation, useful for distribution, marketing and product development?”

“How is it possible, that we objectively perform better than our competitors in certain aspects, but come off worse by direct comparison? Is our clientele more demanding than our competitor´s clientele and are we therefore evaluated more critically?”

“How does the market work exactly? Why do which customers decide in favour of which competitor? Are there certain typical patterns in decision behaviour on the part of the customer and can we make use of them for product development, sales- and marketing activities?”

“How strong is the loyalty of our customers in fact? Are we going to lose customers, how many, which customers, why and to whom? Can we win new customers in return? How many, which customers, how and from whom?”

“Is the use of sociodemographic characteristics in fact sufficient in our world today or should we rather apply different lifestyles and other psychographical characteristics of various customer groups as distinctive criterion?”

“Isn´t it people in the companies rather than companies, who make the decisions? How do segmentations of companies, especially organisational-demographic segmentations, match to people in the companies?”

Identifying different types of customers → gaining a deeper understanding of the market → a more precisely rendered product development /modification, effective marketing and communication, efficient sales and distribution → how do you get there?

Since there are numerous different scientific objectives in connection with the deduction of customer typologies / market segmentation, it is very important to apply the appropriate methodological approach to your special analysis. When chosing the approach, we attach great importance to receive discriminatory data, especially regarding data collection.

Generally choice-based or scales-free methods should be preferred – especially in an international context: the different application of the scales tend to result in extreme bias and thus to mere artificial segments. Eventually, that applies to customer satisfaction measurements as well. At least in certain cases a complementary scale-free method is more qualified.

There is no ideal way to deduce segments. It is essential to employ a diversity of different mathematical / analytical approaches and to check the resulting segments for intrinsic logic in terms of content and methodically for reproducibility. In particular this applies to marketable segmentations, for which reverse segmentation approaches have proved to be superior.

Our software proSim can be very helpful to identify or check the concrete affiliation of the individual person to a certain segment. In the scope of segmentation studies, you can assign your existing or potential customers to the deduced segments / customer types by means of customer evaluation.